A text to speech interface for Universal Digital Library

The objective of Universal Digital Library (UDL) is to capture all books in digital format. A text to speech (TTS) interface for UDL portal would enable access to the digital content in voice mode, and also provide access to the digital content for illiterate and vision-impaired people. Our work focuses on design and implementation of text to speech interface for UDL portal primarily for Indian languages. This paper is aimed at identifying the issues involved in integrating text to speech system into UDL portal and describes the development process of Hindi, Telugu and Tamil voices under Festvox framework using unit selection techniques. We demonstrate the quality of the Tamil and Telugu voices and lay out the plan for integrating the TTS into the UDL portal.